LUCIA FOLENA
1
Notes on The Tempest
Fig. 1. A ship sinking in a storm
1. "What cares these roarers for the name of king?" (I.i.16-17)
SHIP  self-enclosed community with its own rules & hierarchy, different from those of society
(here: reversal, as in Medieval & Renaissance representations of World Upside Down)
(= ISLAND: for both, cf. Robinson Crusoe): ● ELSEWHERENESS
● EXPERIMENTAL SPACE (& TIME) onto which one
may project imaginary solutions to real problems
("Utopian" tradition)
2. The storm as chaos (I.i.-I.ii)
The storm intervenes to disrupt the (already) reversed (but still well-defined & rigorous) order
of things on board, turning inversion into chaos, altered order into absolute disorder.
Sine iustitia, confusio
When Fire, and Air, and Earth, and Water, all were one:
Before that work divine was wrought, which now we look upon
Fig. 2. A Renaissance engraving representing primeval Chaos
2
STORM as actual CHAOS = only the disruption of an order which is already disorder will make
it possible to reconstruct the (correct) order of things in the world:
→ STORM also as METAPHOR of disorder; in that sense it only ends with the rainbow (Iris) in
the masque at the end of the play when order is restored.
3. tragedy & comedy
potential tragedy turning into comedy due to happy ending (rainbow, peace):
INTENTION vs. DEED: Ant. & Seb. potential murderers & regicides,
prevented from turning intention into act by – fear of subjects' reaction (12 yrs back: )1
– Prospero through Ariel now (II.i.193325).
→
no bloodshed, no capital punishment, no tragedy.
4. fate & fortune
TRAGEDY = (also) reflection on relation between impersonal, extra-human forces of Fate or
Fortune and human decision and action – Prospero (also) as incarnation of Destiny,
manipulating other characters, directing their lives and gestures like an unseen stage director
governing a company of actors unaware of his presence; or like a deity.
But Prospero is also subjected to this superior force which he attempts to control & use for
restoring order:
By accident most strange, bountiful fortune
(Now my dear lady) hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore, and by my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.
(I.ii.178-184)
"Tempest" thus = not only "storm" but “particularly significant moment in time” (offering
opportunities Prospero must seize before it is too late). Etymology:
Lat. tempestas (derived from tempus), originally related to notions of “period”,
“epoch”, “moment”, “circumstance”; then to ideas of “weather” or “climate” , hence
also “bad weather” or “stormy weather”, as well as, metaphorically, “calamity” or
“misfortune”. Cf. the derived adjective tempestivus or its Italian descendant
tempestivo, “timely”, “well-timed”, “opportune”, “quick in taking advantage of
occasions”, etc.
Ant. & Seb. also constantly on lookout for "right times".
5. time
→
The play's action takes up from 2 to 6 p.m. (I.ii.249-41; V.i.2-5): the moment in which a
whole past and its errors are resolved and redeemed, as in a miniature Judgment-day of which
Prospero is both an actor and the divinity who assigns rewards and (might inflict)
punishments, who absolves and condemns (morally).
Unusually strict adherence to pseudo-Aristotelian unities. Characters outside normal space &
normal time: stripped of social masks of dignity, honour, rank; "naked", revealing the “real”
natures hidden under the coverings of social superiority and gentility.
MIRANDA. Wherefore did they not / That hour destroy us? PROSPERO. […] they durst not, / So dear the love my
people bore me, nor set / A mark so bloody on the business, but / With colours fairer painted their foul ends.
(I.ii.138-43)
1
Application of "Aristotelian" unities also relatable to
→:
3
6. metatheatrical component
● Prospero as: – “god”;
–
“stage-director” (as well as author of "play") demiurgically intent on
manoeuvring his actors so that the events represented depend entirely on him and on
the instructions he gives to Ariel and the other spirits;
– "actor" himself, changing costumes acc. to role played (Duke, father,
magician: e.g., I.ii.23-24; V.i.84-86).
● Island as stage.
● Snare set by Pr. for Cal., St. & Trinc.: stage costumes ("glittering apparel", IV.i.186 ff.): St.
& Tr. seem to prefer playing the king and his courtier as in a performance or a Carnival
entertainment to actually being such figures (IV.i.221 ff.).
● Banquet & harpy scene (III.iii.18-82): play-within-the play, "living drollery" = comic show
(III.iii.21).
● Masque (IV.i.60 ff.), completely controlled by all-powerful stage director Pr. Vanishes when
he decides so (IV.i, stage direction after l. 138). P.'s explanation broadens the metatheatrical
element into a version of the theatrum mundi metaphor:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
(IV.i.148-156)
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(IV.i.156-158)
Life is theatre & life is a dream (baroque; Calderón):
Human life = illusion and appearance deprived of any substance; nothing in the “real” world
has a more concrete existence than a dream or a theatrical production.
● Also: mirrorings between Prosp. and Shak.: the playwright as magician &c.
7. father-daughter relationship
Tempestas & rite of passage: M. led by Pr. in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Need
for her now to know her past, a basic component of one's grown-up identity. Crucial moment;
discontinuity marked by his putting her to sleep (I.ii.184-186); when she wakes up she will be
a “new” person.
Pr. as Mir.'s father & teacher, but also "mother". M. remembers nothing about her mother.
On the boat 12 yrs back Pr. symbolically re-enacted the labour and the childbirth:
[. . .] I have decked the sea with drops full salt,
Under my burden groaned, which raised in me
An undergoing stomach to bear up
Against what should ensue.
(I.ii.155-158)
So she's become entirely his daughter. Cf. Sycorax-Caliban (I.ii.261-284; the 2 relations as
reversed mirror images of one another: good magician vs. bad witch, wonderful daughter vs.
execrable son, Algiers vs. Milan, female vs. male, etc.).
Pr. has "formed" Mir. by bringing her into existence, but also by educating her – more like a
son than a daughter: she ignores the "feminine" art of coquetry and the subtleties of
roundabout seduction so she declares her love plainly to Ferd. (III.i.81-86), but she's very
good at cultivating her reason and playing chess (V.i.172 ff.).
8. absence of female characters
(apart from Mir., who is not yet a "complete" woman, lacking sexuality & motherhood).
Surprising, in a group coming back from a wedding. Different ship? Maybe; or maybe
deliberate attempt to draw attention to the important female figures of the goddesses in the
4
masque, in part. Ceres [see below].
9. sexuality
No Venus in masque: no sexuality (IV.i.87-101) unless institutionalized within marriage and
aimed primarily at ensuring, through reproduction, the continuity of dynasties. Interdiction
placed by P. (to F.) on sexual consummation before wedding (IV.i.13-23). F.'s answer:
As I hope
For quiet days, fair issue, and long life,
With such love as ’tis now, the murkiest den.
The most opportune place, the strong’st suggestion
Our worser genius can, shall never melt
Mine honour into lust
10. nature, nurture & reason
(IV.i.23-28)
Contrast F. here with Calib. who tried to rape Mir.
Ferd.: aristocratic upbringing + humanist education. F. corresponds wholly to the traditional
aristocratic idea that “noble birth” is linked with “nobility” of soul and behaviour, while at the
same time embodying the notion of human perfectibility through “nurture”, which is typically
humanistic. In passage above F. says he knows how to use his reason—as the faculty
enabling to distinguish good from evil and to behave accordingly—in order to control and
subdue his instincts. Caliban has intellectual "reason" — he can learn and understand – but
not moral "reason". Acc. to P. he's
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick
(IV.i.188-89)
However not literally devils, Ant. and Seb. betray their humanity by deliberately choosing what
they know to be evil. So Pr. sees them as “unnatural”. Humanistic principle of human nature
= reason (T. More).
You, brother mine, that entertained ambition,
Expelled remorse and nature, whom with Sebastian
[. . .]
Would here have killed your king, I do forgive thee,
Unnatural though thou art.
(V.i.75-79; italics added)
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance.
(V.i.18-28; italics added)
P.'s forgiveness—granted even though they do not seem to repent, differently from Alonso
(V.i.118-119) and even from Caliban (V.i.294-297)—is also the fruit of an appropriate use of
“reason” to control and repress irrational impulses suggested by the emotional part of human
beings (made up of passions and instincts):
11. slavery, wildness and civilization
Cal. was turned into a slave because of a crime (attempted rape; cf. also F. accused of being a
spy & traitor & temporarily becoming a slave). Ariel servant, not slave. "Humanistic" slavery
(cf. More's Utopia) – different from historical slavery – < irrational, "unnatural" behaviour.
Outlook on human beings here establishing a fundamental distinction based on the following
homology:
WILDNESS
:
CIVILIZATION
=
INSTINCT
:
REASON
New World natives (to 16th- & 17th-c. explorers) = "Wild Men".
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Fig. 3. A “wild man” imagined to live in a European forest
Wildness, often emblematically represented as cannibalism = total absence of social rules &
codes > fear.
Fig. 4. A New World cannibal
Exploration & early colonialism: the traditional (Christian-humanist) positive view of human
past (Golden Age, Christian Eden – loss of happiness & human history as attempt to recover it)
now gradually begins to give way to the “modern”, evolutionary and pre-anthropological,
notion that the earliest condition of human beings in the world was incomparably inferior to
that reached by developed and advanced nations. Both views are identifiable in The Tempest
(a transitional text).
Gonzalo, in the description of his ideal commonwealth, essentially draws on the first of the
two viewpoints, as he makes clear in his final words:
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour. Treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have, but nature should bring forth
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Of its own kind all foison, all abundance
To feed my innocent people.
[. . .]
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
T’ excel the golden age.
(II.i.162-71)
[. . .]
no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all,
And women too, but innocent and pure,
No sovereignty—
(II.1.151-59)
As a whole, Gonzalo’s “utopian” vision presupposes that the elimination of all that makes
human life “civilized” and “developed”, far from throwing people into danger and poverty,
would make their lives far happier and purer:
His is an almost word-by-word reproduction of a passage in Michel de Montaigne’s Essay “of
Cannibals”:
there is nothing in that nation that is either barbarous or savage, unless men call that barbarism which
is not common to them.2 [ . . . ] what in those nations we see by experience doth not only exceed all the
pictures wherewith licentious poesy3 hath proudly embellished the golden age and all her quaint
inventions to feign4 a happy condition of man, but also the conception and desire of philosophy. They
could not imagine a genuity so pure and simple as we see it by experience, nor even believe our society
might be maintained with so little art and human combination.5 It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that
hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers,6 no name of magistrate nor
of politic superiority, no use of service, of riches or of poverty, no contracts, no successions, no
dividences, no occupation but idle, no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no
manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason,
dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon were never heard amongst them.
There is a striking similarity between Montaigne’s (and Gonzalo’s) description and a passage in
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1650-51) representing the “state of nature” — the original
condition of humankind before the “invention” of states:
In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently
no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no
commodious building; no instrument of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” (Des cannibales), in Essays (Essais), Eng. trans. John Florio (1603). In modern
English the passage might read as follows: «there is nothing in that population that is either barbarous or savage,
unless one calls barbarism that which is uncommon in one’s social and cultural context. [ . . . ] What we see among
those [New World] populations through [reports of travellers’] experience is not only superior to all the
representations with which literature based on imagination has proudly adorned the [myth of the] golden age, and
[also superior] to all the sophisticated inventions [which the same literature constructs in order] to describe a[n
original] human condition of happiness, but [it is] also [better than] the [ideal societies] created and wished for by
philosophers [such as Plato in his Republic]. The latter were unable to imagine a genuineness as pure and simple as
that which we see [in those countries] through [reports of travellers’] experience, and [they were] incapable of
believing that our society might be kept alive and well with so little human intervention [aimed ad establishing
institutions, laws and all that characterizes “civilized” life]. This is a population—I would say in answer to Plato—which
has no kind of commerce, no knowledge of books, no understanding of mathematics and music, no post of public
official or administrator nor any role implying political superiority, no master-servant relationship nor social difference
based on property, no contracts, no inheritance, no division of land or wealth [i.e., no private property, everything
being owned in common by all], no work of any kind, all being inactive, no respect of family ties but only of the
common [ties among all members of the nation], no clothing or body coverings except those provided by natural
objects, no cultivation of land, no use of wine, corn or metal. Even the words which mean lying, falsehood, treason,
dissimulation, covetousness, envy, denigration and pardon were never heard among them».
3
“Poesy” in the Renaissance did not necessarily refer to verse but indicated all forms of imaginative writing and
fiction, as opposed to realistic, matter-of-fact writing (e.g., treatises, religious works, etc.). “Licentious” here
essentially means “unrestrained by concerns with truthfulness or likelihood”.
4
“Feigning” expresses the same idea represented in modern English by the noun “fiction”: imagining, creating,
without aiming at reproducing factual reality.
5
“Art” and “human combination” are almost synonyms. Both are seen in opposition to “nature” as the contribution of
human beings to the modification (and, ideally, the improvement) of the original state of the physical world.
Montaigne sees this kind of human intervention as absolutely negative, resulting in creating a steadily increasing
distance between contemporary societies (in late-16th-century Europe)—societies characterized by corruption and
injustice—and the purity and happiness enjoyed by human groups in their original, “natural” condition.
6
“Letters” refers to literature and erudition in general (all that one can read in books), but also to literacy and reading
as such; “numbers” indicates primarily the knowledge of mathematics, but may also be referred to music and poetry
(based on “numbers” in the sense of rhythm and stresses).
2
knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is
worst of all, continual fear; and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short.7
7
Linguistic analogies, but complete reversal: a dismal picture of a sort of hell on earth.
Pessimism about human nature: its aggressiveness, not restrainable by reason (hence homo
homini lupus), may only be checked by the external authority of an absolute monarch or
dictator on whom his subjects bestow their personal freedom in exchange for safety. Outside
strong “civil” states with rigorous laws and institutions, Hobbes declares, “there is always war
of every one against every one”. Cf. also Swift's Yahoos (Gulliver's Travels, 1726).
Fig. 5. Another New World cannibal
P. sees Cal. as a half-human, half-devil being. The others see him as a half-human, halfanimal. This may be seen as a recognition of his “wildness”, his being “uncivilized”.
Fig. 6. An imperfect human being, not entirely formed
(actually the image represents an “embryo”, that is, a living fetus).
The Tempest as a whole seems to suggest Gonzalo’s ideal commonwealth is unrealistic,
because “wild” human beings are aggressive yahoos rather than meek inhabitants of Eden or
gentle Golden Age people. Anarchy & chaos, symbolized by cannibalism & rape, are always
threatening to destroy civilization. Gonzalo's subjects would resemble Caliban, unfit to live in
society with others.
7
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1650), Chapter XIII.
8
This is suggested by the central presence of Ceres in the masque. Acc. to Ovid after the fall
from the Golden Age she was the first to give laws to humans so as to enable them to live
peacefully together (Met. V.341-43). In the words of a contemporary of Shakespeare’s,
Abraham Fraunce, she
first found and taught the use of corn and grain, and thereby brought men from that wild and savage
wandering in woods and eating of acorns to a civil conversing and more orderly diet, and caused them to
inhabit towns, to live sociably, to observe certain laws and institutions, and for these causes was herself
made a goddess.8
12. monsters, wonders and things of darkness
● Caliban as "monster". Pejorative implications, but etymologically the Latin word monstrum
(from moneo) was originally used about exceptional creatures, things or events, regardless of
their aesthetic qualities, and in Renaissance collections of images (like those reproduced
above) the term “monster” was applied to all that was strange or unfamiliar, different from the
kinds of people, animals and plants then common in European countries. Likewise (though in
a completely positive sense), Mir.’s name is etymologically linked to the feeling of wonder or
admiration, which is precisely what Ferd. instinctively experiences for her: “O you wonder!”, he
exclaims before knowing her name in I.ii.427); later, on being told it, he repeats “Admired
Miranda, / Indeed the top of admiration, worth / What’s dearest in the world!” (III.i.37-39).
● Apart from the literal meaning (“he’s my servant, as the other two, St. and Trinc., are
yours”) are there symbolic implications to what Pr. says in speaking of Cal. with Alonso, “this
thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (V.i.275-276)? In a sense, recognition that inside
Pr., as inside all other “civilized” humans, there is a core of “darkness”, wildness, savagery,
violence—what three centuries later, in a Freudian perspective, one might have termed the Es
or the unconscious—and that if it is not kept under strict and constant control this part of the
individual is potentially disruptive, or even completely destructive.
8
Abraham Fraunce, The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurche (1592) (MS, pp. 26-27).